Word: motifs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...black--we hear a "haunting," "exotic" flute and soon the clatter of oxen's feet. After an interminably long time, the camera finds the cattle, and immediately pans in on the cloven hooves scuffing through the dusty soil. Thereby Rooks has introduced what turns out to be a major motif in the movie--feet. The film's fascination with this part of the anatomy is endless. When Siddhartha pads solemnly through the forest in search of you know what, we become familiar with his dirty toes. And when Siddhartha has 'crossed the river" (this, by the way, is symbolic) into...
Gunter Grass, the German writer and active supporter of Willy Brandt, has described himself as a snail. His latest book, From the Diary of a Snail, has as its organizing motif metaphors about snails. When he is pressed by an interviewer's question Grass often answers with a disarming "ah yes but my party is a party of snails." Collecting snails--this is the hobby of the fictional personification of Doubt in Nazi Germany, a character, also called Hermann Ott, in Grass's book. Melancholia and the achievement of political "stasis in progress" are two of the themes which dignify...
...creator, in the fictional sections. Grass claims that his books are to be kept separate from his political pronouncements, but he is vague and contradictory on the limits of his two identities as "citizen" and as "writer." The same ambiguity weakens his book, and forms the snail motif to work itself out almost into absurdity trying to hold the pieces together. Grass claims that he writes first of all for himself, to work out his own needs and that any writer who says he is writing primarily "for society" is simply not telling the truth. It is instructive that Grass...
...Blue was, as Goossen points out, a predictive work. Its curves, both supple and spare, would become one of the marks of Kelly's style. The blue "door" in the middle - physically enclosed by the lip of white relief around it - would, in a different way, become another motif. Kelly's mature painting is very much a matter of cut and constriction. Shape burgeons across the canvas, brushing against its edges in such a way that within the bald format there is no dead space. Kelly's paintings are pervaded by a subtly indicated force, a sense...
...powerful Hollywood moviemakers who rode the crest of the "road" phenomenon to success at the box office wanted to revive this form of film entertainment, they could well begin right here in Cambridge. The movie would be called "The Road to Moscow," and it would integrate the forties travel motif that brought Hope, Crosby and Lamour fame and fortune with a seriousness of purpose quite alien to the fluff and whimsy that characterized earlier efforts...